The silver lining politically: its not like the impact goes away. So progress won't just grind to a halt from one bad administration or one country's government. And there is a lot of progress happening.
To my understanding, the only time CO2 emissions were down was during covid.
While there are a few localized success stories, I'm not aware we've actually meaningfully impacted our trajectory.
To be abundantly clear: it's true that eg. Trump's administration will have limited effect, mainly because it's a global thing ... But global emissions have been rising, too.
People have predicted peak CO2 multiple times, but it hasn't actually crystalized beyond the shutdown year to my knowledge.
And now they stated a public CO2 reduction goal for the first time.
I suspect people in the US haven't really noticed this as much because the 100%+ tariffs on cars and PV isolate the country from the dramatic changes happening everywhere else. Here in Germany I can buy 2 kWp in panels plus an inverter for under 400€.
We now seem in the unfortunate place where we have kicked or are kicking off system dynamics that are going to cause a large scale reconfiguration of our life support system.
But all that's modeling, there are too many variables to really know.
Our government is owned by the ultra wealthy who pursue their own narrow interests at the expense of the common good. Some of these people are just cynical; others identify their narrow interests with the common good. In either case they’ll continue to steer our world toward self destruction.
The best thing to do isn’t to hide one’s head in the sand or place our faith in failed institutions. These are two kinds of denial. We should be building a base of popular power in labor unions. The ideology is solidarity and striking holds actual power over the ownership class. It’s really the only thing that has a chance of leading society out of the collapse we are witnessing around us.
You might argue the ONLY progress -- in the US -- is not at all from the gov't but from private players genuinely caring about the issue. A lot of people wake up in the morning and decide they'd rather work on an important issue, like climate, than squeezing a tiny bit more profit for some soulless corporation.